A three-year-old girl was reported missing last Tuesday. Agonisingly, she was found dead under mysterious circumstances in a secluded spot next to the Nariman Point fire brigade depot by the police the next day. Can this situation get worse? Certainly, because it is not an isolated crime, it is being conjectured that the authorities might just have a serial offender on their hands. Because she was found in the same area where the body of another child was discovered, reportedly by children playing there, last November. The earlier little baby was also roughly of the same age. And the fact that both children are from poor families does not make their trauma any less grievous, or indeed less terrifying.
Because losing a child even for a few hours is soul destroying, a fate that is possibly the most traumatic part of parenting. There are children kidnapped by malevolents, or lost to accidents and disease, and these circumstances can mostly be attributed to what is unknown, unforeseen, or then outside, untold forces.
But, there are circumstances when children are taken away deliberately, by known, authoritarian forces. What of such instances, how does one fight these? Like in the case making headlines now, that of an NRI family in Norway. Their children were taken away by Norwegian childcare services in May last year, and it is an ongoing relentless battle to get them back, now requiring political intervention. Ostensibly, they were taken because of reasons, which many feel, stemming more from a difference in culture than purported cruelty by the parents.
One of the reasons offered for instance, reports say, is that the Norwegian authorities objected to hand-feeding the children, equating that to force feeding. But if you do a quick recce, you’ll know most parents in India hand-feed their little ones — culturally, it is accepted here. At the recently concluded Jaipur Lit Fest, author Amy Chua spoke on exactly such differences, which made what was acceptable in one culture seem cruel and over-the-top in another. She mentioned how calling her daughter a translation of ‘garbage’ to get her to respect her parents was acceptable by Chinese standards, but made for anathema and considerable shock, when revealed in the Western culture.
Such differences require careful consideration so that we don’t slip into the ‘big brother watching’, terror state scenario. Why look as far as Norway? We had a case in our own state recently, front-paged by this paper, where a hyper-eager NGO had taken a little two-year-old from her own home in the misplaced zeal of ‘saving’ her from prostitution, when the ‘prostitutes’ in question were actually the age-old culturally embedded Devdasi family, now making an honest, if meager, living. The traumatised mother was kept away from her infant by the same authorities eager to set an example, though what kind of example was really the abiding question.
What if women’s groups had not stepped in and helped get her message across? Would she never have seen her child, an extension of her very self (as most in our country believe little ones are), ever again? Which brings us to other such mothers, fighting to retrieve their lost babies — unknown, unheard perhaps, and so unhelped. It would serve authorities better to make a distinction between what’s right and what’s best, especially when it comes to the nuanced nature of parent-child equations, bound as they are by not just sociological but cultural and most of all emotional and familial factors.
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